PITTSBURGH, PA — Shares of language-learning app Duolingo plunged 18% in after-hours trading Tuesday after millions of users worldwide simultaneously realized that completing 500 consecutive days of five-minute lessons has not, in fact, made them bilingual.
The mass realization occurred when user Jennifer Martinez, 34, attempted to order coffee at a café in Barcelona and discovered that “el gato bebe leche” and “la mujer come manzana” were not particularly useful phrases in real-world conversation.
“I have a 647-day streak,” Martinez said through tears. “I can tell you that the boy eats bread and the girl drinks water, but I genuinely cannot ask where the bathroom is. What have I been doing with my life?”
The revelation spread rapidly across social media, with thousands of users sharing similar stories of linguistic inadequacy despite years of daily app usage and increasingly aggressive push notifications from the company’s mascot owl.
“The owl threatened my family if I didn’t complete my lesson,” said Mark Thompson, 28, who has maintained a 423-day streak. “I thought that kind of psychological pressure meant I was actually learning something. Turns out I just know how to translate ‘the horse is big’ in seven different languages.”
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn attempted to reassure investors during an emergency conference call, noting that while users may not be able to hold basic conversations, they have achieved something arguably more valuable: a sense of daily accomplishment and a paralyzing fear of disappointing an animated owl.
“Our data shows that 87% of users feel very productive while using Duolingo,” von Ahn explained. “Whether they’ve actually learned anything is, frankly, beside the point. We’re in the gamification business, not the education business.”
The company’s stock continued to slide as users began sharing screenshots of their elaborate vocabulary trees alongside videos of themselves failing to understand native speakers. One viral TikTok shows a user with a 1,000-day streak attempting to order food in French, ultimately resorting to pointing and saying “this one” in English.
Linguistic experts were unsurprised by the revelations. Dr. Patricia Chen, a professor of language acquisition at Georgetown University, noted that five-minute daily lessons focused primarily on translating decontextualized sentences about animals and food are “not exactly an optimal path to fluency.”
“It’s almost as if real language learning requires sustained effort, immersion, and actual conversation practice,” Dr. Chen said. “But that wouldn’t fit into a mobile game format with cute animations, so here we are.”
Duolingo has announced plans to address user concerns by introducing even more aggressive notifications and adding a new feature where the owl personally visits users’ homes if they miss a lesson.
The company’s stock closed at $212.23 in after-hours trading, down from $260.02. Analysts expect further declines as users continue discovering that their extensive knowledge of which color the cat is cannot help them navigate actual human interaction in foreign countries.
When reached for comment, the Duolingo owl was unavailable but reportedly seen updating its LinkedIn profile.